The Rollup Method: Turn Long Notes Into Simple Ideas
Defeat informational overwhelm so you can start creating more.
Problem of Long Notes
Do you have a lot of long notes from books, videos, or courses that sit in your Google Drive, Notion, or Obsidian gathering dust? Are these notes full of good ideas, but they feel like a chore to pick through and use in your creative work?
I know I feel this. The last thing I want to see when I pull out a note to use is this:
The Deeper Problem
This is a microcosm of a deeper problem. We are drowning in information. There are more social media posts than you could ever read, innumerable emails, and countless new books all flooding our limited attention and paralyzing our decision-making abilities—if we let them.
Frankly, this is a champagne problem. We should be popping corks and celebrating that we have more knowledge than at any time in human history—medical knowledge that saves lives, construction knowledge that one-hundred-story skyscrapers sit on top of, and so on. Despite this, we still face the problem of information overwhelm.
This problem, although seemingly modern, is millennia-old. The Greek philosopher Thales first identified it over two thousand years ago. He noticed that there is a great multiplicity of things in nature—plants, animals, people, rocks, etc. And, there is a great multiplicity of any one of those things (e.g. yellow rocks, red rocks, porous rocks, etc.). This is the same as today. If you think about it, the fundamental amount of unprocessed data, provided by our sense organs, hasn’t changed. What has changed is how much people have processed that data and documented and distributed it. People have published exponentially more books since Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1436.1 And, with entrepreneurs creating the internet and smartphones, people have shared even more information in other forms.2 This problem of multiplicity has been around for a while—it’s just that, in the 21st century, technology emphasizes how much data is present in the world.
How can we begin solving this problem at the level of our notes? How can we reclaim them and think about them more clearly? The Rollup Method (and a deeper principle) can help.
The Solution: The Rollup Method
The Rollup Method is a five-step process I learned from Nick Milo’s Notemaking Mastery Course. The steps are:
Write down ideas: Freewrite or take notes from another source.
Summarize blocks into headlines: Add bold, descriptive headers.
Write takeaways: Condense your headlines into a few takeaway sentences.
Create a clear title: Summarize your note in a few words.
Link to higher-level notes: Connect it to broader themes or topics in your system.
This is the same process as reverse outlining an article. Reverse outlining involves summarizing paragraphs into their main points and then summarizing the main points into the theme of the article. So, if you’re familiar with this method, just think of The Rollup Method as reverse outlining your notes.
If you already have notes that have blocks of text in them, you’ve completed the first step. Steps two through four are pretty self-explanatory. But step five only works if you have a notemaking system in which you can link notes to each other.
Below is a before and after picture of rolling up one of my free written notes.
I did this by:
Rolling up my 980-word free-write into red headers.
Rolling up my headers into a 75-word takeaway paragraph.
Rolling up my takeaway paragraph into a 7-word title.
I highly recommend using a tool such as Notion or Obsidian that has toggle headers that are marked by a “>” symbol. This enables you to hide blocks of text, providing a visual cue that you’re rolling up your notes.
By rolling up your notes like this you can:
Think with essential ideas, not scattered details.
Start projects faster by revisiting summarized ideas.
Learn faster by leveraging the generation effect.3
You don’t have to follow this process perfectly to get benefits. At the very least, you can take a minute or two after capturing some notes and summarize, in a few sentences, what the note is about at the top of it.
Whatever level of rolling up you do, if you make a habit of it, you’ll equip yourself with simple but powerful ideas that don’t bring you a sense of dread and confusion, but, rather, clarity and excitement.
The Deeper Solution: The Principle of Unit-Economy
One principle from philosophy that can help us understand the value of The Rollup Method is Ayn Rand’s principle of unit-economy.4 In her book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, she points out that the human mind can only hold so many items or units simultaneously. To demonstrate this, try to imagine as many different people in your mind as you can—friends, family, coworkers, etc. If you introspect on this process, you may notice you can only visualize up to about five or six unique people (or entities). If you can visualize more, you may have an exceptionally large working memory—but there’s still a limit. This limitation is present no matter what we think about. The principle of unit-economy states, in essence, that “thinking requires reducing mental units.” So, if you want to think about these six people (or a million), you can simply hold that in mind with a single mental unit: “six people” or “a million people.” If you want to think about any large number of things, you can hold them in mind with a single mental unit (a concept)—granted that you go through the proper process.5
Getting overwhelmed by information is a natural part of the creative journey. But, it’s not a state you have to accept. The Rollup Method can help you reduce mental units. It’s about taking the multiplicity of your notes and boiling them down to their essentials—the essentials that help you create more and get overwhelmed less. Start rolling up today, notice how much clearer your notes become—and how much easier it is to start thinking and creating.
According to Britannica, “Before the invention of printing, the number of manuscript books in Europe could be counted in thousands. By 1500, after only 50 years of printing, there were more than 9,000,000 books.”
According to Exploding Topics, using data from Statista, nearly 403 million terabytes of data are shared each day.
The generation effect is the fact that we remember information better if we generate it with our mind than when we just read it. I’ll be writing on this topic later.
Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 62-63
For details on the process of concept-formation, see Ayn Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology